Freedom, isolation go hand-in-hand in far north

Father-son trip along the Dempster Highway included a cancan show, an arts festival, and toe-dipping in the Arctic Ocean

By Dan Holmes, Canwest News ServicesNovember 19, 2008

There are only two possible outcomes when travelling on a father son trip: It will be one of the best times of your life or you will be a miserable heap. Lucky for me my experience was not the latter.

On my father-and-son adventure we chose to complete the infamous tire-popping Dempster Highway culminating with the Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik. The Dempster is a 736-km gravel road that connects the Klondike gold fields in the Yukon to Inuvik and the famous Mackenzie delta in the Northwest Territories. The highway is the only road in Canada to pass over the Arctic Circle.

Three days of driving up to the Yukon, two stops in Whitehorse for a fishing license, a quick detour to the Yukon Brewing Company and we were off to Dawson City. When travelling in the far north you can feel both the wind of freedom and the grip of isolation growing tighter the further you travel north. Every kilometre you travel, the polar influence becomes more evident. You can see it in the trees, smell it in the air and feel its sting on your face.

We stopped in Dawson City to rest our eyes and stretch our legs. It seemed criminal to visit Dawson without enjoying a few of the local attractions, so we caught a cancan show at Diamond Tooth Gertie's, panned for gold and washed all the fun down with a sour toe cocktail garnished with a severed human toe. "Drink it fast or drink it slow but your lips must touch the toe."

It was now time to start our real journey. A modest sign marked the beginning of the Dempster, 40 km east of Dawson City. After driving 75 km we visited the first and, in my opinion, the most extraordinary sight of our journey, Tombstone Territorial Park. The Ogilvie Mountains reach to the sky as a colourful carpet of tundra rolls out below. The first night on the Dempster we spent at little Eagle Plains. The town acts as the unofficial halfway point of the Dempster with a hotel, campground and gas station.

The next day we started early and were blessed with the sight of a lone wolf skirting alongside the road fearless of our presence. A sign marking the Arctic Circle was a symbolic reminder of how far we had travelled. For the remainder of the trip the open, nearly treeless landscape hid nothing from our eyes, making us feel like voyeurs peering into the naked heart of the north.

During our first day in Inuvik we visited the Great Northern Arts Festival a half dozen times. The festival is a grouping of more than 90 visual and performance artists from across the north converging in one place. The show was the largest and most exquisite collection of northern art my father and I had ever witnessed. Inuvik is not a large community but we managed to spend a couple hours touring around town viewing the unique home construction necessary for building on permafrost.

The day before we left we took a tour to Tuktoyaktuk, a nearby Inuvialuit community to the north. Tuk, as it is colloquially known, is situated on the Arctic Ocean near the confluence with the Mackenzie River. Tuk can only be reached by air in the summer. The flight gave us an opportunity to witness the grandeur of the Mackenzie delta. After we touched down at the small airport a school bus picked us up and took us on a tour of the community. Our first stop was for a toe dip in the Arctic Ocean, followed by a quick climb up a pingo (earth-covered ice hill formed by the expansion of underground ice) and finally a tour of the Catholic Church where our tour guide gave us an emotional history of the church, residential schools and the odd visit by polar bears to the community. On the flight home we were able to observe a pod of beluga whales swimming in the sea below.

After four days our time was up and we had to retrace our drive back down the Dempster and eventually home. The Dempster has its challenges but it grants great rewards.